When it comes to getting to bed on time and staying in dreamland long enough each night, it seems many of us suffer from “retrospective bias.”

Retrospective bias is a term used in psychology to explain the phenomenon that describes why people tend to remember the past differently than it actually played out, often by romanticizing it into something it wasn’t. It might explain why people continue to booze hard: they forget how bad a hangover feels. Retrospective bias is probably also the reason people continue to order sweet-and-sour pork.

In the case of sleep, we often forget how lousy we feel when we don’t get enough. So our retrospective bias keeps us up at night staring at computer screens and TVs, getting second and third winds when our bodies should be sleeping.

But if we drill it into our minds that proper sleep does more important things than just make us feel refreshed in the morning, maybe we’d make it a bigger priority.

Much of the science about sleep is still unknown, but there are emerging theories that connect good sleep not only to overall health but also to improved athletic performance.

For Team U.S.A., defeating Team Europe at last month’s CrossFit Invitational wasn’t the only challenge. While in Malibu, Calif., team members were subject to metabolic analysis by Pepperdine University… Continue Reading

Athletes I have found ZMA taken 30 minutes on an empty stomach prior to sleep to be effective for a good night's sleep. I also eat a heavy carb meal which releases serotonin and fuels my morning workout! Stay strong!

The CrossFit Journal is a chronicle of the empirically driven, clinically tested, and community developed CrossFit program. Our mission is to provide a venue for contributing coaches, trainers, athletes, and researchers to ponder, study, debate, and define fitness and collectively advance the art and science of optimizing human performance.